


pass on your way, then, with a smiling face

by youremyqueen



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Domestic, F/M, Fix-It, M/M, Multi, OT3, Polyamory, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-09-25 21:05:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9844184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youremyqueen/pseuds/youremyqueen
Summary: Flint sleeps in the spare room until he doesn't.





	

**Author's Note:**

> most of this was written pre-4x04 so like? let's pretend everything is good and i am not screaming at the top of my lungs. takes place in a hypothetical post-series unlikely victory.
> 
> title is a marcus aurelius quote because ya'll know what up.

After the war, he goes back to the old house.

The china smashed, the curtains torn, the walls dyed gray with smoke, all of her things scattered, cast aside to make room for guns and maps, war machines, war documents. The books are where she left them, mostly, stiff and costly on the shelves. Her room is little touched, a small measure of respect from Billy which cannot compensate for every other instance of disrespect, but in this moment, on the hot dry morning after their victory, when Flint rides from Nassau without a word— _goodbye_ , or _thank-you_ , or otherwise—he’ll take this one small comfort above any other.

He sleeps on her bed which smells like her, above the quilt, shedding nothing but his boots, and when he wakes in the evening he shakes out of his rumpled jacket, crawls under the covers, and sleeps again.

 

—

 

The cattle walk close to the house, trampling the wilted garden, and two children lead them away with giddy hollers, herd dogs loping after them.

“Get away from there, that’s a pirate house!”

“I thought it were a witch house?”

Flint finds the broom and sweeps up the shards and the dirt, finds a rag and wipes the walls, the tables and chairs. He changes her bedsheets so they smell like clear crisp no one, and finds the kettle dented behind the stove, washes it, and puts it on. Anxiety underlies his every action. Nassau will not stay on the coast where he left it, but follows him into the kitchen, into the drawing room, out onto the porch and back inside again. He wonders if they are getting on and how badly they are missing him. He wonders if he won’t ever go back, if this rotting wound in him will scab over at last, and the doings of pirates will be of no more concern to him than they were to James McGraw a decade before.

He opens the book only when he has exhausted every other avenue of occupation, and finds this, too, untouched. _T.H._ waits for him on the inside cover as he always does, with the same reassurance: that all of this was _for something_.

The house is silent but for the tree branches that knock the windowpanes as they sway in the evening wind, and this time Flint doesn’t know if he believes it.

 

—

 

They come sooner than he’d expected, and in greater number. He’d wanted one, but he gets two—is that not always the way of it?

Silver’s fist is heavy on the door, and Madi urges him in a low voice not to be so insistent, not to spook him. Flint waits, steeling himself, on the other side of the door, only opening it when the voices fall away and he fears, for a moment, that they have given up and gone.

He is in house clothes, plain and unimposing, and he doesn’t know what to say when Silver looks at him with forceful tenderness, misted in a way that pirate kings ought not be, and limps uninvited through the doorway and hugs him. Hugs him like what—a brother? Flint’s arms hang limp at his side until Madi gives him a look, her brow arched knowingly, and then he raises them, awkwardly patting Silver on the back and wishing he wasn’t so warm, that he didn’t demand so much all of the time.

“You think you could get away that easily, you miserable bastard?” he says into the side of Flint’s face, breath brushing his ear, and it’s supposed to be a joke but his voice lurches with something unfunny and true. He must hear it, because he swallows, lets go and steps back. “We were worried about you.”

“I thought you might be.”

He nods to Madi, and she nods to him, and their lack of embrace hangs heavily over the moment, but to try it would be even more horrendously uncomfortable. Silver glances between them and doesn’t say most of the things that he could.

“You have a spare room here, don’t you?”

Flint has rehearsed plenty of reasons as to why he cannot return to Nassau, but he had not anticipated this, and he is too slow to refuse. Silver is already in the kitchen by the time he opens his mouth.

“I,” he says, turning in a slow arc, “suppose.”

Madi wipes her shoes on the mat before stepping over the threshold, and the look she gives Flint is at once apologetic and adamant. “Thank you for having us.”

 

—

 

The spare room is not too ill-used, but the bed is a single, so Flint takes it and lets them have Miranda’s room, with its vanity and its wide window, dust on the dresser, dust on the jewels. If her ghost could haunt this place it would sit by that window and watch the road for him, but she is somewhere deep beneath the Carolina soil and Madi’s laughter fills the house now, seeping through the walls, with Silver’s following it, a glad new laugh for a glad new man. Parts of Flint that always ache quietly grow louder in the night. He dreams that he has lost something that he cannot remember the name of, and wakes gasping, phantom seawater filling his lungs.

Laughter still, this time from the kitchen.

He pads down the hall on bare feet, into the brimming daylight that spills in through the newly un-shuttered windows, the searing hiss of a pan hot with oil filling the room. Silver hobbles around animatedly, rifling through the cabinets and stirring overflowing pots as he speaks. The twitch of expression on Madi’s face when she notices Flint makes him drop off mid-sentence, spinning on his good leg and declaring, with a wide and artless grin, “I’m making breakfast.”

Flint blinks at him. He feels like he’s stepped into the wrong house. “With what?”

“We went to the market in town,” Madi says. “They were afraid of us, but they liked our coin.”

“There’s eggs, and link-sausage, and bread, and—shit.” Something on the stove is beginning to smoke, and Silver limps over and waves it off with one of Miranda’s floral oven mitts as Madi watches on the way a spectator might watch a dancing bear.

“Grapefruit,” she adds.

“And grapefruit,” Silver agrees, then curses again.

Flint could turn around and walk right back into bed, could dodge this blooming overexcited domesticity and retreat back into the cool blue space inside himself which feels nothing and has nothing and wants nothing, but a plate is pushed into his hands and a chair is pulled out for him and Silver and Madi keep on talking like nothing is the matter, like the world has always been this bright and full and loud and happy, and he sits and eats because the moment makes it so hard to do anything else. His dream still pulls at the edges of him, his throat still stings with salt. Silver’s cooking is not as bad as it used to be.

“The eggs are overdone,” Flint says, anyway, because they are a bit and he doesn’t know what else to say. A week ago all was artillery and tactical advantage and the ache in his sword arm, and he’d had something in him always, orders to yell and plans to argue, bargains to refuse and bargains to make.

Now it is just this: the clatter of his fork upon the plate, the pause in their conversation.

Silver rolls his eyes, but Madi gives him a slow knowing look, stands, and says that she is going outside to see if anything can be salvaged from the garden. The wooden smack of the backdoor closing leaves him alone with Silver for the first time in so long that Flint is not sure that they will quite recognize each other. He looks at the table and looks at his own hands and does not look anywhere else, even when Silver speaks.

“You might have said goodbye.”

Flint has stodgy, dissatisfying answers for this: the earliness of the hour, the percussive confusion of the aftermath, the balking unsentimental masculine principle, and other such lies that Silver doesn’t even give him a chance to tell.

He continues, taking loping and uneven steps around the table to where Flint is sat at its head, “Since you didn’t, I could only suppose that it wasn’t goodbye. That you intended to be followed.”

Flint sets down his knife and fork and looks at him. “I did assume that someone would be sent to drag me back, yes. And I did assume it would be you.”

“I’ve no intention of dragging you anywhere.”

“Rackham,”—

“Rackham’s furious. He says there’s no point in having a pirate council if more of the members are wearing gowns than not, and that you’ve just as much of a responsibility as the rest of us to stay and sort through the wreckage, but he’s just blowing air around. He knows he can’t make you return. He knows you can’t be made to do anything.”

“So then what,” Flint asks, “are you doing here? Going to market, cooking breakfast, the two of you playing house in _my_ house?”

He would like to be cold and still but he is warm and red and bothered and Silver must notice. Silver, who talks in that low voice and places his hand atop the table with such strategic care, staring in full earnest down at him.

“Not two,” he says. “There’s three of us.”

Flint feels his expression fold over into itself. His nostrils flare and his jowls heat and he shakes his head. “Don’t,”—

“Why not? You’ve done it before, haven’t you?”

Flint’s jaw hangs open; the rage wars against the thrill. Sat on overturned logs in the depths of the forest, he had unclothed parts of himself that had been neither seen nor heard of by anybody else, opened himself to exploitation, to defamation, to that intimate sort of cruelty between those that trust and those that are trusted, but this goes beyond all of that. He hadn’t meant to describe those months in detail, that warm, grinning holiday of bodies and dinners and love—love is what it was, he barely remembers it, but that’s what it was—but it had come out, stilted at first, and then more easily, falling out of his grin and settling in the air between them.

Silver had been compassionate then. He is not being compassionate now, but he doesn’t look like he realizes it.

Flint stands slowly, and the rooms bows before him. “You dare,” he says, very quietly, “come into this house— _her_ house—and compare yourself to,”—

“I’m not comparing,” Silver says, blocking Flint’s path with his body. “I’m offering.”

“Well,” Flint spits, “I’m declining.”

“You haven’t even heard the offer.”

“I don’t need to. I don’t want,”—Flint stops short on the words: _your pity_. Silver is standing too close to him, eyes too keen, mouth too sure, and Flint realizes that he thinks he’s being a very good man, and maybe he is but it hurts way down deep, past the flesh and whatever it might want, into the most shaded places, the places he doesn’t look at or spend time agonizing over. That’s where the shame lives.

The silence stays for only half a moment before the clop of the door sounds again and Madi slips back inside, quick and matter-of-fact, and says, in a voice that suggests that she knows exactly what it is she’s interrupting, “There’s nothing. Only rot.”

Flint doesn’t look at her, doesn’t look at Silver, just knocks his shoulder as he passes around him and goes out of the room.

 

—

 

Madi sets a bottle and two glasses down on the table in front of him and wordlessly takes the other chair. It’s not a bottle he recognizes, must have been bought in town too, but he knows the glassware, delicate thin-stemmed snifters that he’d pulled from a prize half a decade ago and brought home to Miranda, who had accepted them with warm and purposefully incurious gratitude and always brought them out for company.

Flint sniffs. “What’s this?”

“We are going to drink,” Madi says.

“I don’t want to drink.”

“Fine, then I am going to drink.” She pours herself a knuckle of whiskey, her movements deliberate and un-self-conscious, her face characteristically unreadable. She takes a sip and doesn’t flinch, but he can tell by the strain of her throat that she would like to. “I wanted to ask you,” she says at length, corking the bottle, “about the woman whose house we are in.”

Flint lets his eyes fall away from her face, over the glinting exposed skin of her shoulder, to woodgrain of the table, to the woodgrain of the floor, the rug, the logs by the fireplace, the flowers dead in their vase. He says, “I’m surprised Silver didn’t tell you.”

“He said only that you loved her, that you loved her husband, and that they are both now dead.”

Flint’s eyes flicker up again. Madi regards him calmly, without melodrama or censure.

“Well, that’s all there is to it, really.”

“Is it?” She picks up her glass again, but doesn’t take a drink, her fingernails clinking softly. “ _I hear you say: ‘How unlucky that this should happen to me!’ Not at all. Say instead: ‘How lucky I am that I am not broken by what has happened and am not afraid of what is about to happen.’_ ” Her smile blooms slowly as she speaks, and something locked inside of Flint shudders on its hinges. ”’ _The same blow might have struck anyone, but not many would have absorbed it without capitulation or complaint._ ’”

“How,”—he begins, and then remembers. “I left it on the desk.”

Madi nods. “The page was marked, the passage underlined. I read the note, too.” She does not apologize for invading his privacy and he does not wish her to.

“Did Silver see it?” He feels foolish for asking. He cannot decide which answer he would prefer to hear.

She shrugs. “I didn’t show it to him, but he may have. I cannot imagine he would pass up an opportunity to go through your things.” She shows him mercy and does not linger on the subject for long. “I hope you don’t mind if I read the rest of it. My father had some of his books, but not all twelve.”

“You’re welcome to it.” And then, hesitantly: “You’re welcome to anything in this house.”

She makes him nervous in a different way than Silver does. She is more sure than Silver has ever been, more queen than he has ever been king. Flint wonders what she would have thought of him, clowning about peeling potatoes with Randall, stealing gold and then giving it back, the slippery little shit with the insincere grin. Flint tries to reconcile that man with the one that waits, brittle and strong, at the peak of his every sweating dream, but it is a hard thing to do.

It is a hard thing just to have those dreams.

“Thank you, Captain,” Madi says.

“Don’t call me that. That’s not what I’m called anymore.”

She nods, and takes another sip. “Thank you, Flint.”

He nods back, then sighs and slides the bottle across the table with a hollow scratch and pours himself a drink in the glass she’d set out for him. “You’re welcome.”

 

—

 

He’s a few knuckles past a hand and his face is warm and he is speaking of Thomas.

“He was—funny, in his own specific way. The things he said weren’t overtly humorous, but he’d give me this look out of the side of his eye when he was speaking, at dinners and at his—he had these—these salons. Everyone else would blink and nod in full earnest, but he would look at me and I would look at him and it would be _funny_. And if Miranda were there she would dig her fingers into my thigh under the table, and I would watch her mouth tense at its edges, stifling a grin. There were jokes that only we three were in on. No one else could touch them.”

Madi is looking at him with soft and studious eyes, the orange glint from the fireplace flickering over her face and deepening the hollows of her cheeks.

“He,”—Flint continues, but then the floorboards creak and Silver appears in the doorway and the story he was going to tell suddenly feels too intimate. He lets the words wither in his throat and covers them up with his drink.

“Evening,” Silver says.

Madi is already standing by the time he makes it fully into the room, collecting her glass and retying her skirt at the waist, greeting him with a short and meaningful look. As if they had pre-negotiated a trade, she touches Flint once on the arm and makes for the door. “I will see about dinner.”

“You don’t need to go,” Flint says, before he can convince himself not to, eyes following her, asking her to stay and stand between them.

She pauses in the doorway. “I’ll be back. Thank you for lending me the book.”

Silver does not take the seat that Madi had vacated, but settles onto the sofa beside Flint, the cushions shifting under his weight, putting them closer to each other than they have any need to be. He feels now as if he had been lured into a trap, plied with drink and made sentimental, then turned over to Silver at his weakest. He blinks and shakes his head before Silver even begins to speak.

“I ought to watch out. You two may yet charm each other out of any need for me.”

Flint snorts, feeling it rasp against the back of his throat. “Don’t play coy. She’s in love with you. You’re in love with her. It’s very plain.” He waves his hand in an accompanying gesture which suggests the amorphous and unseen shape of _love_ and tries to not to feel anything about it.

Silver’s grin softens. “That’s funny.” He tilts his head toward Flint’s, breath warm and stinking like pipe smoke. “She said the same thing to me, not very long ago, about you.”

Flint feels himself growing warm, his pulse thudding uncomfortably, the hairs on his arms standing up. He would like to go his room and lock the door and not hear any of this, but he stays still, of course he stays still, pinned down under Silver’s eager eyes, and says, forcing his tone level, “Did she?”

Silver nods. “Naturally, I denied it at first, but I realized, of course, on some level. On some level, I’ve known for a while.” He is deplorably close to Flint now. “That if you were to go away, I would go with you. That I cannot quite be without you. But now I cannot quite be without her, either, so you understand the problem. And, presumably,”—his grin is soft and promising—“the solution, as well.”

Flint opens his mouth, shakes his head. “It won’t,”—he begins.

“We’ll live in this house.” Silver’s eyes are insistent, his fingers sure on Flint’s arm, twisting into the material of his shirt. “We’ll make breakfast. We’ll plant the garden. We’ll rule Nassau, she and I, and you won’t ever have to go back there. But should you ever choose to, there will be a chair waiting for you at the table. There is a chair for you here. We could do it all, Flint, and it wouldn’t even be difficult.”

He’s got that look of treasure-hunting awe in his eye. The pads of his thumb rubs a heavy circle over the crease of muscle where Flint’s arm meets his shoulder.

“And how,” Flint asks, trying not to slump into the touch, “does she feel about this?”

Silver doesn’t falter. “Ask her. Madi!”

Flint rolls his eyes. “Don’t. Fuck’s sake.”

He hears her footfalls padding from the kitchen and a part of him is relieved to see her and another, a greater, part is just embarrassed. He shrugs out of Silver’s grasp when she appears in the doorway, Miranda’s large black-bottomed pan clutched in one hand.

“Madi,” Silver says, “do you want to stay here?”

His hand is back on Flint, sliding up his thigh, slow and soft and reassuring, and Flint likes it, hates that he likes it, hates even more that Silver knows that he likes it and is doing it because he likes it. Madi glances between Silver’s hand and Flint’s face soberly.

“You know I do,” she says.

She holds Flint’s eyes as Silver leans his forehead against the side of Flint’s head, nose tucked against the crook of his ear, mouth hovering hot over his neck. Flint shudders as he asks, “Madi, do you want Flint to sleep in the spare room tonight?”

Madi sets down the pan on the oaken corner table with the wobbly foot and takes two steps forward. “You know I don’t.”

 

—

 

They get him out of his clothes. Madi sits topless at the foot of the bed, legs crossed under her skirt, watching as Silver jerks him off with a sweating, slick fisted urgency.

“Slow down,” she says. “It’s no good if you rush through it that way.”

“I don’t know,” Silver says hoarsely, smiling against Flint’s ear. “I think it’s pretty good. Is it good, Flint?”

Flint just grits his jaw, hips pressing up, and says nothing. Miranda’s wide bed squeaks on its hinges, headboard smacking the wall, her untouched perfumes and delicate unnamable toiletries rattling on the vanity.

Silver says, “I think it’s good,” and grins at Madi, and she grins back, and there is a warmth between them that Flint had thought impossible, as if such unblemished camaraderie had died a decade ago in England, unable to be resurrected ever again, and especially not in this house, on this island. His body is hot between them and when they look away from each other they turn to him.

“Come here,” Silver says.

Madi hesitates. “I do not like to go where I am not wholly invited.”

“You’re,”—Flint starts, but Silver palms him in a way that makes him unequal to the words and he falters, grunting.

“I think,” Silver says, “that you’re invited.”

Madi is slow to move up the bed, anyway. A hand upon his knee, hand upon his thigh, his stomach, his chest. Her skirts flow over his skin, sensation buzzing against him, and he blinks up dazedly at her when she leans in and presses a kiss to his forehead. She is warm and dewy and bright, and kind to him. No one has often been so kind to him, without ceremony, just simple and clean and good. When she looks at him, he feels good.

Silver murmurs something low, promising and filthy in his ear and Flint’s hips jerk up again. His attention is being sought, he realizes, and the heavy rusted thing inside of him that drags him to the bottom of the ocean in his dreams is beginning to lighten.

Madi climbs out of his lap and into Silver’s, gripping his face in her hands and kissing him on the lips, and Silver slows on Flint’s cock and Flint doesn’t truly mind, rolling against them, closing in against them, bodies slick and hot, and he has not been home in a long time, but here he is. Here they are.

He comes with Madi’s small fingers clutching his jaw while Silver kisses him, beard chafing rough, lips wet and crushing. He comes and Nassau town is still teetering at its end, but here there is only this. The bed stills and the vanity stops clattering. The mirror above it shows them in dips and shadows.

He watches Silver fuck Madi into Miranda’s feather pillows and falls asleep with somebody’s hand cupping the back of his neck, somebody’s hair tickling his chin.

The spare room sits empty at the other end of the hall.

 

—

 

When he wakes he is alone in the bed, and there is light pouring in from the window that faces the road. He had forgotten that this house could fit so much light in it. He sits up, groggy and sore in the right places, parts of him that had atrophied from disuse brought out, dusted off, and put to work. The house is creaking with movement.

Silver is by the window, and Flint only notices him when he moves, glancing up from the book in his lap at the sound of the bedsheets rustling. Flint blinks at him, naked and not totally sure of what to say.

Silver closes the book. “James,”—it shakes him to hear that name, shakes him further to hear the rest—“my truest love, know no shame.” He looks at Flint like he is searching him out, trying to find the shame if there is any, trying to find the place where he keeps it ten years later, what frail bones it is tucked behind.

“You’ve,” Flint tells him, standing so that the sheets fall from his wast, “no right to those words.”

“I’ve no real right to any of this.” Silver looks around, from the book to Flint’s hipbones to the doorway that Madi’s hum floats through. “Yet here I am, and here we are.”

Flint nods, finds his trousers discarded on the floor, and bends to pull them on. “Here we are.”

He dresses and they walk down the stairs, shoulder to shoulder, and the joy Flint feels stays still inside of him, unable to quite move for fear of toppling his—what? Good fortune? Is it luck to be invited, or has the invitation always lived between them, waiting for him to reach out and take it? He reaches out, he steadies Silver down the last step, where the bannister turns sharply and it is easy to lose one’s footing even on two feet.

“Good morning,” Madi greets, and kisses Silver’s cheek, and Flint just stands there and doesn’t know where to put his eyes or his hands until she walks over and, casual as anything, kisses his, too.

Her lips are warm, her eyes acknowledge his awkwardness and then take it from him and put it away.

“Sit,” she says, and he does as he’s told, and the three of them take breakfast in Miranda’s kitchen, on Miranda’s silver filigree plates, while the breeze flows in through the open windows. It is tinged with a hint of salt that has blustered in off the sea, but it’s faint enough to barely be noticeable.

 


End file.
